Search form

How to Vote in Iraq's Elections

With security improving, the toughest part of Saturday's Iraqi
provincial elections might be educating voters about how to mark their
ballots. An attempt to explain a truly complex process:

The
elections are for the provincial councils in 14 of the country's 18
provinces. The councils are powerful entities that will choose the
governors, who control the police forces among other things. The
Baghdad province council has 57 members. Others have as few as 26
members. In all, voters will choose between a total of 14,431
candidates to fill 440 seats. Candidates are grouped on lists, or
slates, put together by political parties and coalitions of parties;
there are more than 400 parties fielding candidates.

The current council was elected in 2005, using a different process than the
one now being implemented.Then,
people could only vote for the entire list and the individual
candidates were barely known to the public, in part because of the
security risks then. This time, an "open" list format will let voters
choose a slate and an individual they support on that slate.

Having that many candidates makes printing ballots difficult. In
Baghdad, with more than 2,400 candidates, a ballot with all their names
could run to 60 pages. The solution: Only the slate names, not the
candidate names, are spelled out on the large ballots. Voting for the
slate is easy. You just tick the box next to the slate you want (which
is shown with its electoral number, name and logo).

If you want
to vote for a particular candidate on that slate, it's trickier. To the
left of the slate names are columns of boxes, each with a number.
There's a box for every seat on the council. In Baghdad, for example,
there's a box next to a number 1, another for two, and up to 57.

You
have to know your candidate's number on their slate's list so you can
check the box by that number. To find that number, you have to scan a
dazzling array of posters throughout the polling center that show the
names of the candidates on each slate and what number they correspond
to. For example, in Baghdad a list for for each slate would be on the wall
showing the candidates numbered from one to 57. The voter has to find
the number that corresponds to their preferred candidate. The voter
then ticks the box with that number. Got it? To make this easier, some
candidates are handing out palm cards that show exactly the numbers for
the two boxes to tick for specific parties and people.

You can
vote for a slate and leave all the candidate boxes blank. But if you
vote for a candidate and don't mark the slate, your ballot won't count.
This makes sense. Say you just chose box number 10 on the ballot, that
means you're voting for the 10th person on some party list. Unless you
marked the party list you're choosing from, it's impossible to tell
which person you are referring to.

Tabulating the votes is also complicated. First,
elections officials have to figure out how many council seats each
slate wins. To do that, they look at how many votes were cast and
divide that by the number of seats on the council. Say it turns out to
equal 40,000 votes per seat, then a slate will get a seat for every
40,000 votes it wins. Or, roughly, if one slate wins a third of the
votes, it will get a third of the seats on the council. The slate's
seats are then divvied up based on who its biggest individual
vote-getters were. If a slate wins just one seat, only its top vote
getter will get to be on the council. If it wins two, the top two get
seated. Complicating this a quota to help women win representation.
Slates are supposed to make one third of their seats go to women (this
originated with a clause that U.S. diplomats insisted be included in
the Iraqi constitution).

In most cases, the first seat would go
to the top vote getter, who would probably be a man. The second seat
would also likely go to a man. The third seat would go to the slate's
highest vote-winning woman, even if she won fewer votes than some of
the remaining men. (It does not mean women will comprise one third of
each council, since many slates will just get one or two seats and give
them both to men). Some provinces also have seats set aside for
minorities, such as Christians. Those will go to the highest
vote-getters within those minority groups.

United Nations
officials insist that such procedures have been used in other
countries, including Germany, Macedonia, Spain and Bosnia, with
success. But the system leaves open many scenarios that people here are
just starting to figure out. For one, it tends to favor the established
parties. People dazed by all the choices between parties with similar
sounding names might just revert to the ones they're most familiar
with. And many might just vote for a party without doing the extra math
to choose their specific candidate.

On the other hand, a very
popular candidate could win so many votes that he or she wins extra
seats that the party can use to hand out to others. And, yes, as in
other elections, voters will have their fingers dipped in ink--about
88,000 bottles have been imported from India--to limit them to one trip
to the polls.